It’s been a rough week for Euro-skeptic Perussuomalaiset (PS)* Foreign Minister Timo Soini. The firs jab came on Saturday when Sir Graham Watson, the former chairman of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (Alde) in the European Parliament, who said that Soini’s appointment as foreign minister was like having Dracula guarding a blood bank, according to YLE.
The second jab came from the French Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked in January, makes fun of the Perussuomalaiset’s name and outlines who are “true” and “false” Finns, reports YLE.
According to Charlie Hebdo, and since the party claims to represent “true” Finns, those “false” Finns are the Swedish-speaking Finns, Saami, Russian-speaking minority of this country and migrants.
Here’s Charlie Hebdo’s view of the “true” Finn.
Apart from the fact that the PS are eating their campaign promises since they form part of a government that plans to slash billions of euros in spending, they are on top of this a pesudo-socialist, Euro-skeptic and anti-immigration party.
Charlie Hebdo mentioned Olli Sademies, a PS substitute councilman of Helsinki, who wrote that Africans should be castrated after having three children.
Read full story (in Finnish) here.
PS party secretary Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo considered the comment by Sir Watson as “lowly and an attack against Finnish democracy.”
Slunga-Poutsalo went as far as to suggest that such meddling in Finland’s internal affairs hadn’t happened since the days of the former Soviet Union.
* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English-language names adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.